Grand Theft Auto V's map is big and highly detailed. The sky is really beautiful and the world is gorgeous. When playing, I could feel how massive the game is, it always felt like there was always something to do or a new place to go to, I still feel like I haven't even seen the full map yet. These feelings are something only a company with no hesitation to crunch the dev team like Rockstar could achieve, but the façade falls off when you try to look into what the world really has to offer. The open-world is split in three:
-Driving around and murdering people
-Side missions and activities
-Scripted events
This is what's there to do in Los Santos and the surrounding areas. Driving around and running over people is fun when it's the mean to an end, the end usually being starting a mission or going to some place. If your whole purpose is to recklessly drive around town you'll get bored in a few minutes as the driving is “realistic”, although it's not actually realistic driving. Cars don't crash in real life as they do here, realism is the excuse they give for having cumbersome driving. Look, no matter how hard the guys over at Rockstar try, a true realistic driving simulation simply does not work when realistic driving is not the core of the experience, and it definitely isn't for a GTA game. After all, Auto is just ⅓ of Grand Theft Auto. The other stuff is minor content which might lead to some interesting or even funny situations, but just exist to have the world bloated with side missions that feel like filler episodes of a larger TV show and side activities that feel like they don't belong here. I mean, when someone says the words Grand Theft Auto, tennis and golf aren't the things that come to mind, right?
The scripted events usually happen while driving somewhere in the middle of the way so it's up to you if you want to go over and get yourself into whatever is going on, which most likely is someone getting robbed or in some cases you might get a unique event depending on the character you're playing as. I remember driving around the north coast and finding a couple of guys who were pulling a Goodfellas on the daughter of some mafia boss who later paid me some great cash for saving her. I wouldn't mind playing this game again some time in the future just to see what new stuff I can find, but as I've been saying, apart from small situations like these, I don't think there's really much else that is rewarding enough.
The world is empty, is what I'm trying to get to. Quite pretty and impressive when looked from afar, but empty when looked closely. The city serves the one and only purpose of giving context to the main story, and everything else is a distraction to make the player feel like the game is huge when in reality there's not much to it. One thing I'll give it is that, even if it's not something meaningful in the long run, navigating its architecture is quite good, maybe even just a little bit fun. Running away from the cops on rooftops, driving a bike downhill in Mountain Chiliad and parachuting from above the clouds to fall on the pool of a mansion are just examples of what can be done with such freedom of movement. I really like doing this sort of stuff, getting lost in the world and messing around is pretty fun. The world is big and there's like a shit ton of mechanics for the player to express itself, even more on the online, so it's easy to understand why a game like this has so many online roleplaying servers.
Still, all of this is just a mere distraction from the main content, and I found more enjoyment in doing all of this with a friend on a private online game. But enough talk already, let's talk about more interesting stuff.
The side content, the open-world and the main story aren't that disconnected at all. All three are about doing whatever you want without giving a fuck about anything. Grand Theft Auto V pictures a world where everyone is an egotistical douchebag who only looks after themselves and life and death are treated like they hold no meaning. Early in the game there's a mission where you torture someone and potentially ruin their life, only to later turn out this wasn't the right guy, and nobody gives a crap about this whole situation. This thing that I just described is basically the whole game. You can watch someone get crushed into pieces in an airplane turbine and all Michael has to say is “whoops”. I've read around people say GTA V is sexist, in that every woman is portrayed as a disgusting and pathetic person, but this isn't exclusive to women as every person you ever meet in this game is either that, a crazy psycho, a selfish idiot or anything in-between.
Out of the main trio, Michael is the real main character of the game I'd say, as he's the only one who has any kind of actual development. Franklin is a dude who has no direction and has no greater goals in mind, who exists to help the other two in whatever they're doing, and whatever Franklin achieves is by pure chance. A bit later after starting the game he's gifted a mansion from Hollywood Hills for whatever reason. Trevor is a guy whose only personality trait is that he's bat-shit insane. That's it. The game disguises its poorly-written characters under minutes-long conversations while driving to make them look like they have more going on and, more specifically, to make them look cool. GTA V wants to look cool. Why is there a mission where you assault an actor to take their costume and steal a 007-esque car from a movie set? Because it looks cool. Why does Trevor torture some random worker in the most horrible way possible? Because it looks cool. Why does Michael beats the fuck out of the contract negotiator of an underpaid actor and threatens the same actor? Because it looks cool. It wants to make the player feel like they're cool. This is the most straight-out-of-2013 game made, probably ever.
GTA V believes the world is full of freaks and has no salvation, so all you can do is have fun while the world is rotting all around you. Nobody has good intentions because why would anyone even care about anything in this God-forsaken world? GTA V is the embodiment in videogame form of THIS image. The writing is childish, it feels like it was written by a group of depressed teenagers who skimmed over the Wikipedia articles about nihilism and cynicism. But you guys wanna know what GTA V is actually about? Grand Theft Auto V is about finding meaning to your life. This is the level we're at. And of course the characters find the meaning to their lives in crime. Heists and murder more specifically. I always believed GTA, since San Andreas, treated the criminal life as something that is never good to aspire to and that these games weren't just a glorification of crime as a way of life. Although I'll admit my favourite GTA is Vice City, a game that thinks Scarface is just cool looking mafia guy Antonio Fontono gets da big money. In Vice City, Tommy Vercetti wants to rise to the top, no matter how many people he needs to take out in the way, with not many moral conflicts and little to no hesitation to pull the trigger.
But Grand Theft Auto V on the other hand has Michael conflicted on if he should leave this life of crime and start taking care of his family while he does a lot of missions where they kill an absurd amount of cops, private military forces and street thugs just for money or whatever selfish reasons. A moral conflict as deep as a puddle. Later on in the game he gets the opportunity to be a movie producer, something he's really enthusiastic about since he keeps saying he's “a movie guy”, but still doesn't give up on robbing the biggest bank in L.A. And by the way, now that I mention heists and movies, GTA V is an homage to heist films. In a way it's a really, really dumbed down reinterpretation of Heat. And I mean that literally, they even straight up recreate Heat’s first robbery in one mission. It's similar to Vice City in that they both are inspired by crime movies in premise but not in spirit. Scarface and Heat end with a message about how criminal life is never a good thing, but VC and GTA V have the exact opposite message. However, GTA V differs from VC in that it tries to give Michael, the only character with something resembling an arc, some sort of moral conflict about his family, although he doesn't care or think about how the things he does affect his family, he doesn't really care about anyone, he just says everything’s going to be okay and go on with the mass murders. This conflict is ultimately pointless.
After losing his family and later having them come back, after being at the verge of death more than twice, after almost getting his family killed, all he does is putting the bad guy inside of a car trunk and throwing the car off a cliff to blow it up. If problems come to you, all you have to do is to kill the problems, no need to try and be a better person. Extra points if it looks cool when you do it. The game ends and nobody has learned a single lesson from all this.
-Driving around and murdering people
-Side missions and activities
-Scripted events
This is what's there to do in Los Santos and the surrounding areas. Driving around and running over people is fun when it's the mean to an end, the end usually being starting a mission or going to some place. If your whole purpose is to recklessly drive around town you'll get bored in a few minutes as the driving is “realistic”, although it's not actually realistic driving. Cars don't crash in real life as they do here, realism is the excuse they give for having cumbersome driving. Look, no matter how hard the guys over at Rockstar try, a true realistic driving simulation simply does not work when realistic driving is not the core of the experience, and it definitely isn't for a GTA game. After all, Auto is just ⅓ of Grand Theft Auto. The other stuff is minor content which might lead to some interesting or even funny situations, but just exist to have the world bloated with side missions that feel like filler episodes of a larger TV show and side activities that feel like they don't belong here. I mean, when someone says the words Grand Theft Auto, tennis and golf aren't the things that come to mind, right?
The scripted events usually happen while driving somewhere in the middle of the way so it's up to you if you want to go over and get yourself into whatever is going on, which most likely is someone getting robbed or in some cases you might get a unique event depending on the character you're playing as. I remember driving around the north coast and finding a couple of guys who were pulling a Goodfellas on the daughter of some mafia boss who later paid me some great cash for saving her. I wouldn't mind playing this game again some time in the future just to see what new stuff I can find, but as I've been saying, apart from small situations like these, I don't think there's really much else that is rewarding enough.
The world is empty, is what I'm trying to get to. Quite pretty and impressive when looked from afar, but empty when looked closely. The city serves the one and only purpose of giving context to the main story, and everything else is a distraction to make the player feel like the game is huge when in reality there's not much to it. One thing I'll give it is that, even if it's not something meaningful in the long run, navigating its architecture is quite good, maybe even just a little bit fun. Running away from the cops on rooftops, driving a bike downhill in Mountain Chiliad and parachuting from above the clouds to fall on the pool of a mansion are just examples of what can be done with such freedom of movement. I really like doing this sort of stuff, getting lost in the world and messing around is pretty fun. The world is big and there's like a shit ton of mechanics for the player to express itself, even more on the online, so it's easy to understand why a game like this has so many online roleplaying servers.
Still, all of this is just a mere distraction from the main content, and I found more enjoyment in doing all of this with a friend on a private online game. But enough talk already, let's talk about more interesting stuff.
The side content, the open-world and the main story aren't that disconnected at all. All three are about doing whatever you want without giving a fuck about anything. Grand Theft Auto V pictures a world where everyone is an egotistical douchebag who only looks after themselves and life and death are treated like they hold no meaning. Early in the game there's a mission where you torture someone and potentially ruin their life, only to later turn out this wasn't the right guy, and nobody gives a crap about this whole situation. This thing that I just described is basically the whole game. You can watch someone get crushed into pieces in an airplane turbine and all Michael has to say is “whoops”. I've read around people say GTA V is sexist, in that every woman is portrayed as a disgusting and pathetic person, but this isn't exclusive to women as every person you ever meet in this game is either that, a crazy psycho, a selfish idiot or anything in-between.
Out of the main trio, Michael is the real main character of the game I'd say, as he's the only one who has any kind of actual development. Franklin is a dude who has no direction and has no greater goals in mind, who exists to help the other two in whatever they're doing, and whatever Franklin achieves is by pure chance. A bit later after starting the game he's gifted a mansion from Hollywood Hills for whatever reason. Trevor is a guy whose only personality trait is that he's bat-shit insane. That's it. The game disguises its poorly-written characters under minutes-long conversations while driving to make them look like they have more going on and, more specifically, to make them look cool. GTA V wants to look cool. Why is there a mission where you assault an actor to take their costume and steal a 007-esque car from a movie set? Because it looks cool. Why does Trevor torture some random worker in the most horrible way possible? Because it looks cool. Why does Michael beats the fuck out of the contract negotiator of an underpaid actor and threatens the same actor? Because it looks cool. It wants to make the player feel like they're cool. This is the most straight-out-of-2013 game made, probably ever.
GTA V believes the world is full of freaks and has no salvation, so all you can do is have fun while the world is rotting all around you. Nobody has good intentions because why would anyone even care about anything in this God-forsaken world? GTA V is the embodiment in videogame form of THIS image. The writing is childish, it feels like it was written by a group of depressed teenagers who skimmed over the Wikipedia articles about nihilism and cynicism. But you guys wanna know what GTA V is actually about? Grand Theft Auto V is about finding meaning to your life. This is the level we're at. And of course the characters find the meaning to their lives in crime. Heists and murder more specifically. I always believed GTA, since San Andreas, treated the criminal life as something that is never good to aspire to and that these games weren't just a glorification of crime as a way of life. Although I'll admit my favourite GTA is Vice City, a game that thinks Scarface is just cool looking mafia guy Antonio Fontono gets da big money. In Vice City, Tommy Vercetti wants to rise to the top, no matter how many people he needs to take out in the way, with not many moral conflicts and little to no hesitation to pull the trigger.
But Grand Theft Auto V on the other hand has Michael conflicted on if he should leave this life of crime and start taking care of his family while he does a lot of missions where they kill an absurd amount of cops, private military forces and street thugs just for money or whatever selfish reasons. A moral conflict as deep as a puddle. Later on in the game he gets the opportunity to be a movie producer, something he's really enthusiastic about since he keeps saying he's “a movie guy”, but still doesn't give up on robbing the biggest bank in L.A. And by the way, now that I mention heists and movies, GTA V is an homage to heist films. In a way it's a really, really dumbed down reinterpretation of Heat. And I mean that literally, they even straight up recreate Heat’s first robbery in one mission. It's similar to Vice City in that they both are inspired by crime movies in premise but not in spirit. Scarface and Heat end with a message about how criminal life is never a good thing, but VC and GTA V have the exact opposite message. However, GTA V differs from VC in that it tries to give Michael, the only character with something resembling an arc, some sort of moral conflict about his family, although he doesn't care or think about how the things he does affect his family, he doesn't really care about anyone, he just says everything’s going to be okay and go on with the mass murders. This conflict is ultimately pointless.
After losing his family and later having them come back, after being at the verge of death more than twice, after almost getting his family killed, all he does is putting the bad guy inside of a car trunk and throwing the car off a cliff to blow it up. If problems come to you, all you have to do is to kill the problems, no need to try and be a better person. Extra points if it looks cool when you do it. The game ends and nobody has learned a single lesson from all this.
2 Comments
@SoftWinters I started my game during October of last year but got uninterested in it and a bit bored eventually until I decided to finally finish it now. I think it gets lost in trying to be realistic and forgets to be enjoyable. It's more fun to play online tho, but playing anything with your friends is going to be fun anyways. It's more quantity over quality if you ask me.
SoftWinters
3 months ago